Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London (UK). Alexander Sergeant is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster (UK), specialising in the history and theory of fantasy cinema. Each episode, they look in detail at a film or television show, taking listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation.
Episodes
Monday Feb 17, 2025
Monday Feb 17, 2025
In this latest Fantasy/Animation Footnote, Chris and Alex wonder about wonder - a term that emphatically traverses both fantasy and animation as fields of study, yet with alternate meanings and connotations related to everything from mid-1990s cultures of special effects appreciation to fantasy’s historical links to the so-called “wonder film.” Topics include the “wonder years” of special effects production and reception during the 1990s via what Michele Pierson calls a growing “connoisseurship” of effects technologies; histories of the effects-laden ‘wonder film’ as an industrial category and links to the ‘wonder tale’; wonder itself as both the aestheticization of thought and/or thought induced by aesthetics; wonder’s role in fantasy scholarship to describe distinctions between fantasy, horror, and science-fiction; and more recent turns towards expanded animation and the spectatorship and ‘siting’ of wonder in the digital age.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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